Tonight we strike a blow for the puppet film, unaccountably ignored amidst the renewed interest in commercial animation. We've gone to the PFA vault and, with some help from sister archives, selected the cream: an array of puppet films that extend from Edwin S. Porter's delightful The "Teddy" Bears (Edison, 1907, 15 mins, 16mm, MoMA) to Jiri Trnka's harrowing masterpiece, The Hand (Czechoslovakia, 1965, 18 mins, 35mm, PFA). We've found rarities: a charming unknown Starevitch called The Navigator (France, 1934, 12 mins, 16mm, PFA), featuring two dogs honeymooning on a drowning ship; and an excerpt from a Nazi-produced children's parable, The Boy Who Wanted to Know What Fear Was (Germany, 1935, 10 mins, 16mm, PFA). George Pal's once-famous black puppet Jasper makes an appearance in a surreal musical nightmare, Jasper and the Watermelons (Paramount, 1946, 7 mins, 16mm); so do futuristic Nazi war machines in Pal's Tulips Shall Grow (Paramount, 1943, 7 mins, 16mm), the only puppet short ever nominated for an Academy Award. We will excerpt puppet scenes from live-action features, such as puppets reacting to a suicidal bureaucrat in the madly satiric Soviet film My Grandmother (K. Mikaberidze, Soviet Georgia, 1929, 11 min. excerpt, 35mm, PFA). Also, Please Excuse Me (Lubomir Benes, Czechoslovakia, 1974, 5 mins, 35mm, PFA) and a film by Karel Zeman, to be announced, plus added surprises.-Russell Merritt Russell Merritt is a film historian currently teaching at Stanford University, and co-author of Walt in Wonderland and of the Emmy-nominated program D.W. Griffith: Father of Film (1993).